October 27, 2010

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The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit news organization launched decades before the decline of traditional journalism outlets made such organizations the rage, is planning a strategic overhaul aimed at matching donations with earned income in hopes of charting a more sustainable path for nonprofit journalism.

The new strategy, unanimously approved by the Center’s board last Friday, will seek to make the Center’s website a high-traffic destination that can generate revenue through underwriting (nonprofit speak for ads) and membership (nonprofit speak for subscriptions). Until now, the Center has focused on partnering with other media outlets, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and POLITICO, to get its stories to the wider public.

“As the news industry contracts, readers have stated clearly that they still want serious, nonpartisan public-interest journalism,” said Bill Buzenberg, the Center’s executive director, in a statement. “And the nonprofit funding world wants to see new business strategies that take philanthropic capital and grow it through earned revenue. Our plan is to deliver both. We expect this new direction will ensure that, one day, every dollar donated by one of our generous supporters can produce $2 worth of journalism.”

The move comes a little more than a week after the center announced that it would be absorbing the nonprofit Huffington Post Investigative Fund, along with $2 million that the fund had lined up to run it for the next year. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a funder of both organizations, agreed to kick in another $250,000 to help seal the deal, which would move six Fund reporters over to the Center and create one of the country’s largest investigative newsrooms in the process.

“Arianna Huffington was looking for a place for the Investigative Fund,” Buzenberg told POLITICO. “She felt it needed a new place to be. She wanted to get out of the investigative journalism business.”

Several months ago, Huffington approached the Center, and the Center shared its new business plan with her, which made her “very interested,” he said.

“It jump-started what we were doing,” Buzenberg said. “It was very fortuitous, and comes at the time that we are planning all of this change.”

Huffington will join the Center’s board, while the Fund’s board, which she chaired, will dissolve, she said.

“I’ve had long discussions with the Center about how to diversify revenue streams,” Huffington told POLITICO. “Advertising as well as memberships — à la public radio — make a lot of sense as ways of reducing reliance on grants and contributions from individuals, of course.”

Under the new arrangement, which will go into effect Jan. 1, all assets of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund will go to the Center, while the Huffington Post website will agree to run up to three of the Center’s stories each day.

Under the old arrangement, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund struggled to get its stories into many outlets beyond the for-profit Huffington Post, leading critics to question its nonprofit status. (For comparison, The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute spends less than a third of its investigations budget on pieces that appear in The Nation magazine, according to editor Esther Kaplan.) The Fund was given nonprofit status initially through the Tides Foundation, but had also applied for its own status.

The Fund’s lawyer, John Pomeranz, said he was “very confident” about the Fund's application to the IRS for 501(c)(3) status but said that he is cancelling that application now that the it is being wrapped into the Center for Public Integrity.

The inspiration for the Center’s new direction came at a pair of staff and board retreats a year ago, Buzenberg said.

“Out of those two retreats came the impetus to stretch, to reach further, to raise more revenue to do it, and take advantage of a void in the marketplace to do more of this narrow and deep investigative reporting,” he said.

The Center was founded in 1989 by Charles Lewis, a former producer at CBS’s “60 Minutes” who complained at the time that there was “not much muckraking” going on in Washington, despite its legions of accredited journalists. The Center has won numerous journalism awards, and its 2004 book, “The Buying of the President,” was a New York Times bestseller.

When Buzenberg came aboard four years ago after a long career in public radio, the Center was going through a bumpy period financially, but it was also about to witness potentially the greatest need for its brand of journalism, as investigative units across the country were dissolved.

Since then, the Center turned a corner. A recent review of its operations and digital strategy by the Knight Foundation noted that donations jumped by nearly a quarter between 2008 and 2009. That same study contained suggestions about how the Center could more fully embrace the digital age, which the Foundation recently gave the Center a $1.7 million grant to do.

Beyond finding new revenue streams, the Center plans to expand the multimedia aspects of its journalism, redesign its website, further embrace social media and launch a new digital format for reading long-form journalism that will work on all mobile devices.

“We want to be a model for this kind of journalism going forward, “ Buzenberg said. “We want to show that it can be done, and it can be done well. It can fill a void.”

UPDATE: Buzenberg offered the following statement to clarify his quote above: "I'm afraid I may have created a misimpression with one of my short-handed comments to you about our deal with the Huffington Post. Arianna isn't trying to get out of the investigative business. In fact, as she's repeatedly said, she believes passionately in it. She and her colleagues at the Investigative Fund were looking for a strategic partnership so that they could ramp up the work they were already doing in a more powerful way. One way that that is happening is that those reporters and editors are coming to work for the Center. And it also is happening because of Arianna's enthusiasm as evidenced by all of the support from financial contributions to membership recruitment to HuffPost's publishing platform — that she is helping provide as we move forward. She — and we, and many of our funders — are thrilled by what we have mapped out."

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Anytime you have a bunch of JourNOlisters and Obama worshippers like Politico, far-left radical Socialists like Arianna Huffington, and a newspaper like the New York Times that should have been charged with treason for publishing our CIA top-secret terrorist tracking, and money-laundering program through International Banking channels, there is no such things as 'impartial', or "non-partisan"in Media news and analysis. This cabal of all far-left radicals will be no different than NPR, and the rest of the Democratic Party--controlled Main Stream Media. About the only non-partisan news media is the inclusion of the WSJ--and I can't imagine why.

What Keach Hagey hides: CPI is just another Dem Party front group, funded by foreign billionaire (and convicted felon) George Soros. No wonder media Leftists give this announcement such a large writeup.
Keach, try telling the whole truth, for once!

Anytime that you have a far right organization posing as "fair and balanced" media when they are actually a tool to get republicans elected, one has to question the intelligence of the people that comment on journalistic integrity. When that same organization donates over $2,250,000.00 to the republican party and nothing to the democrats, you would have to question what their agenda is. And when that same organization consistently airs stories that have a bias against blacks and Muslims, many of which there are no facts to back up their bigoted and racist comments, you would question their journalistic integrity.

More facts Keach Hagey doesn't tell readers: the funder of both HuffPo and CPI, the Knight Foundation, is headed by Alberto Ibarguen. Guess who Alberto Ibarguen donates campaign cash to..... If you said Barack Obama, you'd be correct.
Soros/HuffPo/CPI/Ibarguen/Hagey. All Democrats, all Leftist, all the time.

The thing about "new media", Politico, is that you can slant the news any way you want, but the public can also use it to verify and analyze. In short, with Huffington/Tides connection, the Center is of as much value as a poisoned well.

Huffington Post investigative journalism arm funded by George Soros associate
Earlier this year, the Huffington Post announced the creation of an "Investigative Fund" to do investigative journalism. The hilarity of the HuffPost doing real journalism is illustrated by the fact that almost six weeks later they haven't produced anything 1 and by their Z-list celebrities who had previously used a related tag 2.
And, while the announcements 34 mentioned the name of the Fund, they didn't mention the Soros connection (link):
The program's startup budget will be $1.75 million. The money will be provided by the Huffington Post and the Atlantic Philanthropies. The Bermuda-based Atlantic Philanthropies is headed by Gara LaMarche, who used to be a vice president of liberal uber-philanthropist George Soros's Open Society Institute. LaMarche is a member of Soros's Democracy Alliance, a billionaires' club that is organizing to impose socialism on America.
1 huffingtonpost.com/tag/huffpost-investigative-journalism
2 huffingtonpost.com/tag/investigative-journalism
3 huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/29/huffington-post-launches-_0_n_180498.html
4 huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/announcing-the-launch-of-_b_180543.html
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-EULwmhH7bwJ:24ahead.com/huffington-post-investigative-journalism-arm-funded-george-s+huffington+soros&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Want to see real non-profit investigative journalism? This veteran mainstream journalist was flummoxed six years ago by a covert federal-local fusion center- based program of extrajudicial targeting, persecution and electromagnetic torture. It took me six years to discover a covert nationwide cell tower- mounted microwave radio frequency weapon system that is being used to silently torture, impair and subjugate extrajudicially targeted Americans -- persons deemed by security autocrats to be "dissidents," undesirables, "enemies of the state" -- or, apparently, journalists worthy of "neutralization."

Please read, and contact me (if you can get through the "full lid) -- in desperate search of a non-profit underwriter:

FYI, in this veteran journalist's queue: exposing the apparent fact that a significant percentage of the comments to political blogs and web sites are generated by "information systems" defense contractor operatives -- developing...